The White Hotel

D. M. Thomas writes lyrically about horrific events. White Hotel pulls no punches in describing the viciousness of the holocaust. Many will complain that they don't need to read depressing stories but as long as the horrors of genocide remain abstract, we are at risk of repeating those horrors. White Hotel exposes the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt described, the casual ordinariness of unbelievable cruelty. For me, the hotel itself is merely life where we go on in the face of unspeakable events and in the knowledge that we all die. I denied the book the final star because I felt the final chapter was an effort to "balance" the picture and subtract some of the heaviness. I found that chapter tedious and not nesely as beautifully written as the rest of the book. Others will, no doubt, disagree.

I like this book and bought a copy for a friend as a gift. When it arrived, the condition of the book was terrible: The front and back covers had clearly been bent, as if read, near the spine. The entire interior was out of focus, as if xeroxed while moving. I immediately returned it only to be replaced by an equally shoddy copy. I don't blame Amazon - although it appears they merely re-stocked this book after having it returned before or perhaps they bought it at steep discount from the publisher because the printing of this batch was just terrible. It's a shame - at a time publishers are fighting for our attention.

Somehow I missed this when it came out and was going around and the "hot" read. I was in an acting class, when someone was doing a scene from Prelude to a Kiss. The White Hotel was mentioned and it peaked my curiosity, especially when the instructor spoke about it in class, at the completion of the scene. My husband died five years ago, and I couldn't focus on anything, not even a magazine article, much less an entire book. This was my first book to not only read, but devour! It seemed as though I knew it, read it before, experienced it before. That deja vu quality was so there for me. I intend to read it again and again and again. The characters came alive for me, and I hung on their every conversation and adventure. Can't say enough about this piece of work. Truly pulled me into it's vortex. Excellent!

A profound and profoundly disturbing story about Lisa a woman of high European culture, an opera soprano who suffers with neurotic symptoms evaluated and treated by Sigmund Freud. There is a dreamlike and fantastical quality to the opening chapters, dealing with her youth, her inner emotional life, and real and possibly imagined love affairs. But there is also a foreshadowing of catastrophe. Indeed, Lisa is eventually caught up in the horror of Babi Yar, an act of genocide in the Ukraine occurring in 1941. The final chapter takes place in Palestine, the Holy Land, the promised land—heaven. Along with the female protagonist of the story, Dr. Freud is among the immigrants, making his way home. I read this book in the 1980's; have always remembered its graceful ending.

Doesn't seem to have any plot or purpose, but a lot of interesting dream-like sexual fantasizing. Not what I was seeking, so I found the little I did read pretty boring. I suppose a purpose may have materialized had I closely read the whole thing.

While sexually graphic at the beginning (and violent later), it all made sense by the end & was useful for intellectual stimulation, but painful for anyone (especially women? Mothers?) of a compassionate bent.I read it for a class and don’t know that I would have gotten very far had it not been for that. Wouldn’t recommend to anyone but the melancholy or coldly dispassionate intellectual.

I first tread this shortly after it was published and on re-reading its effect was still the same. It's a piece of magical realism that has its roots in the life and works of Sigmund Freud but also tackles deeper and darker issues about humanity - and the lack thereof that humans can inflict on each other. It has an historical feel about it but is timeless when it comes to the human condition. Well worth the read - and a re-read.

The White Hotel is one of the most captivating novels that I have ever read. Chapter five is a gripping account of the horror of the Jewish holocaust. Thomas does a skillful job of inviting the reader to identify with the perspective of each character and he elicits deep empathy for each person that undergoes the trials associated with the holocaust. On the whole it is an excellent psychological novel providing a unique perspective upon the very human tragedy of war.

This book swings between sex and death, sometimes regenerative, sometimes utterly destructive. The novel begins as a libidinous poem and then moves to a prose rendition with the same imagery: a white hotel between a volcanic mountain and a stormy lake where a young woman and a soldier she picks up in a train engage in non-stop sex while guests encourage them on, some even participating in the act; meanwhile people are dying outside the hotel, either drowned in a capsized boat on the lake, or via an earthquake on the mountain, or in a cable car breaking off and falling to its doom. Despite the deaths, guests are not in short supply at the hotel, with daily arrivals replacing the dead or departed. We come to realize soon enough that the young woman, Anna, is a patient of Dr. Sigmund Freud and has developed neuroses based on an incident she witnessed between the Polish Catholic side of her family and the Russian Jewish one: her mother’s twin sister, her uncle, and Anna’s mother engaged in a tryst on the family yacht when Anna was three years old, while her emotionally distant father was busy at work. Freud’s conclusion: “Anna possessed a craving to satisfy the demand of her libido; at the same time, an imperious demand on the part of some force I did not comprehend, poisoned the well of her pleasure at its source.” The story moves forward ten years to Vienna in 1929, and we meet Lisa Erdmann, aging opera singer. We discover that she is the real Anna, and that Freud was fictionalizing names to publish her case for his medical archives. Lisa corrects some aspects of the case history, confessing that there were still things she hadn’t told Freud. She meets opera diva, Vera, and partner Victor, both Jewish. Circumstances lead to Lisa ultimately marrying Victor and adopting his son Kolya, and moving to Kiev to live with them. Then we fast forward to 1941; the Holocaust is underway. Lisa and Kolya are involved in the tragic Babi Yar massacre (where 30,000 Jews were beaten, shot and dumped into a mass grave, after being lured out of their houses on the ruse that they were being sent into exile in the Promised Land). What is shocking is the imagery that once dogged Lisa/Anna in her youth plays out in diabolic fashion at Babi Yar. I was trying to figure out whether this woman had been prescient all the time, and whether Freud’s passing statement that she was telepathic had more depth than even the learned psychoanalyst had given it. I was left to puzzle out whether it was the past incident on the family yacht or the future one to come in Babi Yar that had bottled up Lisa into a neurotic state, manifesting itself in pains in her left breast and pelvis for most of her life. Anna/Lisa arrives at her Promised Land, and the unresolved issue in her life has a chance of resolution in this place where the milk of human kindness flows freely, like it once did at the white hotel in her youthful dream. And where the refugees arrive daily, suitcases in hand, just as the guests did at the hotel. Yet, her journey to this state has been one of terrible anxiety and suffering.    This was a hard book to get through, although it was thoroughly engaging. The lack of dialogue, until the last chapter, made it a very told story, but I couldn’t have had it any different, for I needed to be caught by the scruff of my neck by the author and pushed toward the startling conclusion.

The story is haunting verging on disturbing as it follows the life of the female protagonist's life all the way thru to her death at the hands of the Nazis. There are parts of the book that are emotionally very hard to read. But it certainly is worth it. The awkwardness of the style, very un-British, comes from fact that the author uses pastiche, i.e., he imitates Freud's own case-studies on hysteria. This is what makes the story, especially the first part, somewhat confusing, too. It reads as though we are given a glimpse of Freud's original case-study, footnotes and all. One has to keep in mind that the story is fictional and the author has combined multiple of Freud's studies of hysteria.

White Hotel has improved with age,like a good wine. I have revisited it after 30 gears and was dazzled by it for a second time Roger MENDELSON. Australia

Alls bestens

A really enjoyable read which takes you on a journey into the fevered mind of a young woman suffering from hysteria as she is treated by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. What I admire about this novel is how skilfully Thomas allows the hidden meanings behind Lisa's hysteria to gradually emerge, but how things sometimes never appear as they seem, with Lisa herself an unreliable witness.The novel is really a mix of sexual fantasy, buried memories and psychic power. Lisa's pain (left breast/pelvis) and fear to have children are finally revealed as a telepathic anticipation of the horrors of the Second World War and I admire the way Thomas juggles past, present and future in his narrative. It is a psychological puzzle which finally makes horrific sense.My only criticism of the novel is its final, perhaps sentimental, conclusion. It did not seem to ring true with what preceded it.